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Technology Transfer at Columbia

Columbia Technology Ventures is the technology transfer office for Columbia University and a central location for many of the technology development initiatives, entrepreneurial activities, external industry collaborations, and commercially-oriented multidisciplinary technology innovations across the university. CTV’s core mission is to facilitate the transfer of inventions from academic research labs to the market for the benefit of society on a local, national, and global basis. Each year, CTV manages more than 350 invention disclosures, 100 license deals, and 20 new IP-backed start-ups, involving over 750 inventors across Columbia's campuses. CTV currently has over 1200 patent assets available for licensing, across research fields such as bio, IT, clean tech, devices, big data, nanotechnology, materials science, and more.

CTV has extensive experience founding and supporting technology initiatives to enable promising technologies to accelerate across the “valley of death” and reach the market as quickly and successfully as possible. Many of these initiatives are explicitly multi-institutional, requiring extensive collaboration with our peer universities and their tech transfer offices. A few of the organizations CTV has been instrumental in establishing are the PowerBridgeNY clean energy proof-of-concept center, the NYC Media Lab, and the Columbia-Coulter Translational Research Partnership. In addition, the new Translational Therapeutics (TRx) Resource was launched in 2016, in collaboration with the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and The Clinical Trials Office, to advance novel therapeutics from the lab towards the path of commercialization and clinical implementation.

CTV’s efforts are backed by 45 full time staff and an additional 30+ graduate student interns (CTV Fellows), providing broad support to the Columbia community and other stakeholders with marketing, legal (patents, contracts, etc.), business start-up help, and administrative tasks. CTV also runs an Executive-in-Residence program, which brings seasoned industry executives, serial entrepreneurs, and investors to campus to support faculty and student entrepreneurial activities.

For Columbia Researchers

CTV offers the following services to Columbia faculty, students and staff:

Patent filing and IP management

Technology marketing

Technology license agreements

Material and data transfer agreements

Confidentiality agreements

Software "express" licensing

Inter-institutional collaborations

Executives in Residence (XIRs)

Columbia Women Inventors Network (Columbia WIN)

and more!

For Industry and Investors

CTV is actively looking for industry and investor partners and works efficiently to facilitate:

License agreements

Sponsored research agreements

Material and data transfer agreements

Confidentiality agreements

On-campus meetings with researchers

Investment opportunities

Mentoring opportunities

Pitch events

Newsletters of available technologies

and more!

To learn more about our technologies or to submit an invention report, please contact a member of our licensing team, or email techventures@columbia.edu.